FullReads

Long, long ago, when you and I, dear Reader, were young, when the fairies dwelt in the hearts of the roses, when the moonbeams bent each night beneath the weight of angels’ feet, there lived a good, wise man. Or rather, I should say, there had lived, for at the time of which I speak the poor old gentleman lay dying. Waiting each moment the dread summons, he fell a-musing on the life that stretched far back behind him. How full it seemed to him at that moment of follies and mistakes, bringing bitter tears not to himself alone but to others also. How much brighter a road might it have been, had he been wiser, had he known!

“Ah, me!” said the good old gentleman, “if only I could live my life again in the light of experience.”

Now as he spoke these words he felt the drawing near to him of a Presence, and thinking it was the One whom he expected, raising himself a little from his bed, he feebly cried,

“I am ready.”

But a hand forced him gently back, a voice saying, “Not yet; I bring life, not death. Your wish shall be granted. You shall live your life again, and the knowledge of the past shall be with you to guide you. See you use it. I will come again.”

Then a sleep fell upon the good man, and when he awoke, he was again a little child, lying in his mother’s arms; but, locked within his brain was the knowledge of the life that he had lived already.

So once more he lived and loved and laboured. So a second time he lay an old, worn man with life behind him. And the angel stood again beside his bed; and the voice said,

“Well, are you content now?”

“I am well content,” said the old gentleman. “Let Death come.”

“And have you understood?” asked the angel.

“I think so,” was the answer; “that experience is but as of the memory of the pathways he has trod to a traveller journeying ever onward into an unknown land. I have been wise only to reap the reward of folly. Knowledge has ofttimes kept me from my good. I have avoided my old mistakes only to fall into others that I knew not of. I have reached the old errors by new roads. Where I have escaped sorrow I have lost joy. Where I have grasped happiness I have plucked pain also. Now let me go with Death that I may learn..”

Which was so like the angel of that period, the giving of a gift, bringing to a man only more trouble. Maybe I am overrating my coolness of judgment under somewhat startling circumstances, but I am inclined to think that, had I lived in those days, and had a fairy or an angel come to me, wanting to give me something–my soul’s desire, or the sum of my ambition, or any trifle of that kind I should have been short with him.

“You pack up that precious bag of tricks of yours,” I should have said to him (it would have been rude, but that is how I should have felt), “and get outside with it. I’m not taking anything in your line to-day. I don’t require any supernatural aid to get me into trouble. All the worry I want I can get down here, so it’s no good your calling. You take that little joke of yours,–I don’t know what it is, but I know enough not to want to know,–and run it off on some other idiot. I’m not priggish. I have no objection to an innocent game of ‘catch-questions’ in the ordinary way, and when I get a turn myself. But if I’ve got to pay every time, and the stakes are to be my earthly happiness plus my future existence–why, I don’t play. There was the case of Midas; a nice, shabby trick you fellows played off upon him! making pretence you did not understand him, twisting round the poor old fellow’s words, just for all the world as though you were a pack of Old Bailey lawyers, trying to trip up a witness; I’m ashamed of the lot of you, and I tell you so–coming down here, fooling poor unsuspecting mortals with your nonsense, as though we had not enough to harry us as it was. Then there was that other case of the poor old peasant couple to whom you promised three wishes, the whole thing ending in a black pudding. And they never got even that. You thought that funny, I suppose. That was your fairy humour! A pity, I say, you have not, all of you, something better to do with your time. As I said before, you take that celestial ‘Joe Miller’ of yours and work it off on somebody else. I have read my fairy lore, and I have read my mythology, and I don’t want any of your blessings. And what’s more, I’m not going to have them. When I want blessings I will put up with the usual sort we are accustomed to down here. You know the ones I mean, the disguised brand–the blessings that no human being would think were blessings, if he were not told; the blessings that don’t look like blessings, that don’t feel like blessings; that, as a matter of fact, are not blessings, practically speaking; the blessings that other people think are blessings for us and that we don’t. They’ve got their drawbacks, but they are better than yours, at any rate, and they are sooner over. I don’t want your blessings at any price. If you leave one here I shall simply throw it out after you.”